The text of the letter cryptically referenced “certain things in common” that Trump and Epstein shared and ended with a clammy wish: “May every day be another wonderful secret.”
Or so the Journal claimed at the time. Because its report didn’t include an image of the letter, the president’s apologists replied in Pavlovian fashion by crying “fake news!” Trump wasted no time filing a $10 billion defamation lawsuit while his vice president pronounced the story “complete and utter bullsh-t. … Where is this letter? Would you be shocked to learn they never showed it to us before publishing it?”
Then, on Monday afternoon, there it was. Just as the Journal had described it.
You can guess what happened next. “There is no letter” instantly became “the letter is fake,” with Trump flunkies like White House aide Taylor Budowich, Rep. Byron Donalds, and MAGA propagandist Benny Johnson insisting that the signature on it didn’t look like the president’s. But that fell apart when the Journal and other outlets dug up verified examples of Trump’s correspondence from the late 1990s and 2000s to show that, actually, the signature looks exactly like his used to.
From what I can tell, in fact, there’s no actual theory underlying the impromptu new conspiracy theory that the letter was forged. No one can explain how or why a birthday message purporting to be from Trump to one of his close associates would have been doctored for a privately published book compiled in 2003. Did time-travelers from the present day fake the letter and plant it knowing that it would come out someday and damage him—after he’d already been elected president twice?
If so, their plot failed. This isn’t going to damage him. It’s just another broken window in a neighborhood that’s full of them.
An open secret.
I don’t begrudge other Trump critics for needing to believe that the letter is big news.
It isn’t. The Epstein saga isn’t a priority for most Americans, and many of those who do care about it are populists who’ll find a way to compartmentalize their worship of the president from his bromance with a raging child molester. But it’s gratifying to see J.D. Vance humiliated and MAGA toadies forced to degrade themselves by making laughably pathetic excuses for their hero, as happened yesterday when the letter was released.
And it’s a consolation to imagine that something like this could hurt Trump. If you find it hard to cope with what the United States has become, you might understandably retreat into nostalgic fantasy about Americans holding a politician’s sexually suggestive correspondence to the most infamous pervert in American history against him.
The most I can say for the letter’s political salience is this: It bolsters the case that people around Epstein, including but not limited to the president, knew what he was up to. They may not have participated in his crimes but it’s harder than ever to believe they weren’t aware of them.
Consider this charming image from the so-called “birthday book,” depicting Epstein grooming little girls by plying them with lollipops and balloons and then being serviced by them 20 years later. Or how about this jokey photo of him holding a giant check purporting to have been signed by Trump as payment for a “fully depreciated” unnamed woman?
To many of his friends, it seems, Epstein’s sexual habits were one of his defining personality traits. What are the odds that they knew enough about his appetites to joke with him about them, as the president allegedly did in the “naked girl” birthday letter, yet never had an inkling that those appetites skewed toward minors?
Remember what Trump said of his buddy in 2002: “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.” That sounds to me like a sly allusion to Epstein’s open secret, something the two of them would have chuckled about after the quote appeared in print. In fact, it seems so likely that the president knew what Epstein was doing that House Speaker Mike Johnson last week resorted to suggesting that Trump was an FBI informant in the matter—before retracting the claim.
Epstein’s pals probably knew but didn’t care that he abused teenage girls because they had more to lose by ratting out a rich, well-connected friend than they stood to gain. Trump especially would have found that logic compelling, as his moral intuitions have never been much more sophisticated than “Is this person my friend or my enemy?” Even before the letter was released yesterday, he’d lost the benefit of the doubt in the matter among Americans: A YouGov survey published in July found 40 percent of adults believe the president knew “a lot” about Epstein’s crimes while another 27 percent believe he knew at least “a little.”
Yet his overall job approval is steady at 44.4 percent, in line with his traditional floor in polling. For the Epstein issue to hurt him, part of his own base would need to be scandalized by it—and his base has built up an immunity to scandal over time the same way that a person exposed to incrementally larger doses of poison will develop a tolerance and be unharmed.
Andrew Egger explains at The Bulwark:
In a way, Donald Trump and his allies have spent their entire political lives preparing for this moment. The whole miserable decade of “alternative facts,” of witch hunts, of flooding the zone with sh-t—it all amounted to a long, powerful education for his base. It’s a training in a certain kind of zen meditation, in which stories damaging to Trump pass from the eyes and ears directly out of the body without ever intersecting the brain. By now, the base has gotten in their 10,000 hours. They’ve become masters of the craft. They can perform all sorts of remarkable feats—the media-cope equivalent of lying on beds of nails while cinderblocks are smashed on their chests. These cinderblocks, they whisper serenely, are just a liberal plot. If I pay attention, the Democrats win.
The Epstein scandal is the “final boss” of Trump scandals, the supreme test of reality-defying propaganda skills that MAGA has acquired over the course of 10 years. The crime involved, pedophilia, is one of their obsessions; the villain, Jeffrey Epstein, is a lead character in their hysteria about an elite child-abuse cabal; yet the evidence continues to mount that their own messiah, Donald Trump, knew what was happening as it happened and—at best—did nothing to stop it. It’s like the Access Hollywood scandal but with the spin difficulty dialed up by a factor of 10.
Taylor Budowich, Byron Donalds, and Benny Johnson aren’t stupid. (Well, Budowich and Donalds aren’t.) They’ve come a long way on their journey of moral ruin to gain political influence and they’re not about to lose to the final boss now. When they babble about Trump’s signature being forged on the birthday letter, they’re not asking you to believe it. It’s obviously unbelievable. They’re asking you to accept it as an excuse, feeble and unconvincing though it may be, to ignore the story.
What’s true and what’s false about Trump’s relationship with Epstein is beside the point. The point is to defeat the final boss and protect the right’s hold on power. All you need to do to win is find a pretext not to care.
Still, that doesn’t explain the entirety of America’s complacency about this. There are plenty of swing voters who haven’t spent the past decade psychologically training to rationalize any crime Trump might commit, yet they’re also not going to care much about the Epstein revelations. What explains their indifference to the subject?
There goes the neighborhood.
Conservative lawyer Gregg Nunziata said something trenchant shortly before Trump henchman Emil Bove was confirmed to a seat on the federal bench. “The conservative legal movement first bought into Trump because of the good judges,” he wrote, “now it is buying into awful judges because of Trump. This is how movements become corrupted.”
One way to understand his point is as a comment on the shallowness of right-wing thinking. Many so-called conservatives either never cared in substance about legal doctrines like originalism that promised to limit federal power or stopped caring once they had a leader eager to use federal power to serve their own ends. Their loyalty to their principles was pitifully weak and so it migrated easily to the person of Trump once he took over the party.
Another way to understand it is as a comment on how a leader’s poor character will create a culture in which supporters come to expect political corruption. It’s not that all Trump voters suddenly yearn to fill the judiciary with MAGA hacks and toadies instead of Neil Gorsuches and Amy Coney Barretts. They simply recognize that the guy whom they elected isn’t interested in what we might call “civic upkeep” and that he’ll be offering them Emil Boves from now on.
Think of American government as a big neighborhood. The neighborhood has started to go to hell. Its residents are adjusting their expectations for it accordingly.
Bad things happen when neighborhoods start to go to hell. As public evidence of minor disorder and neglect rises, crime gets worse. That’s the “broken windows” theory of criminology—the idea that letting lesser offenses like window-breaking go unpunished signals to good guys and bad guys alike that laws won’t be enforced. Criminals respond by escalating to more serious offenses and law-abiding locals become fatalistic or apathetic.
Trump has broken a lot of windows in our government. How can we expect Americans to maintain the same expectations for civic order that they used to have as the proverbial neighborhood falls into disrepair?
This is why there’s been so little outcry about him pulling off the presidential equivalent of a bank heist, I think. If a business in a good neighborhood gets held up, everyone talks about it. But if a business in a bad neighborhood gets held up, it’s barely news. What can the locals realistically do except sigh and say, “Yeah, that happens now”?
The president is monetizing his office in broad daylight to the tune of billions per year? Yeah, that happens now.
No wonder, then, that Americans can’t get excited about Trump’s history with Epstein. If he were a person of good character committed to ethical government, it’d be earth-shaking to find him sending risqué letters to his child-molester pal. As it is, it’s like finding out that the leader of the local gang that runs the neighborhood is involved in a prostitution racket. You might not approve of it but you’re certainly not surprised.
That’s just how this neighborhood is nowadays.
Because of that, I find it strange that Trump seems so keen to prevent the Justice Department’s Epstein files from being released. Even if there’s material in there that further incriminates him, so what? The diehards will dutifully go on battling the final boss while the rest of us grow more apathetic as more windows break, which is to Trump’s advantage in consolidating power. Oh, you say the president knew for a fact that his friend was molesting teenagers and kept quiet? Yeah, that happens now.
Which makes me wonder: Is an authoritarian movement more likely to succeed if it’s led by a person of terrible character?
“All authoritarian movements are led by people of terrible character,” you might reply, fairly enough, but there’s a case to be made that Trump’s postliberal takeover wouldn’t have made it this far if he were somewhat less awful of a human being than he is. His fans wouldn’t have been forced to put in those 10,000 hours of conditioning themselves to defend everything he does, to borrow Andrew Egger’s point, and everyone else wouldn’t have gone quite as numb to all of the normative windows he’s broken. It’s easier to say “lol nothing matters” to egregious executive power grabs when you’ve spent 10 years discovering that literally nothing does matter to half the country when it comes to their leader’s personal behavior, including attempting a coup.
Authoritarians abhor shame because it’s a brake on ruthlessness in their own ranks and a spur to resistance among their opponents. Trump’s shamelessness has two dimensions: He disdains moral compunction as weakness, as any authoritarian does, but he also behaves personally in lurid and undignified ways that communicate his contempt for decorum. (That’s always been the secret sauce to his social media presence.) If the success of his political project depends in part on breeding shame out of the population, sordid personal scandals are actually useful to him as a complement to his postliberal strongman tactics. They’re demoralizing, and a demoralized population is a compliant population.
The Epstein letter that House Democrats revealed yesterday is one more shame-draining broken window, insignificant in itself but now part of the tableau of the American neighborhood. The hoodlum who runs it at the moment might move on in 2029 but so many windows have been broken already that we should expect disorder to prevail even after he’s gone. Bad neighborhoods are hard to turn around once they’ve been allowed to go bad.
